Macromedia to Port Flash MX to Linux? 702
LnxAddct writes "An article on CNet reports that Macromedia will start taking Linux more seriously. It will start this new initiative by making it's suite of tools run easily under WINE, then depending on the response it gets, it will port it's tools natively to Linux! Their Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch, stated, 'What we've been investigating is, When will it be time to bring our tools to Linux? I think it might be happening now.' Maybe 2004 will be the year of Linux."
Sweet. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sweet. (Score:3, Insightful)
if adobe is reading this...come on...get on the ball you don't need microsoft, your software on windows is half assed anyways (Pagemaker). also photoshop et al. have been ported to MacOS X so it can't be that hard to port and support a *nix env., if i remember correctly you had a unix port at one time. so come on allready.
adobe's going backwards (Score:5, Informative)
Re:adobe's going backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sweet. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sweet. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sweet. (Score:3, Insightful)
You're correct. But even w/ my limited knowledge in PS, gimp is much closer to PS, than win3.1 is to OSX. For the average user, gimp is very well a PS replacement. To say otherwise, would obviously mean that a PS bias is present.
Now, as a linux user, it's always good to see big name proprietary software ported. I've been waiting for FlashMX for a long while.
Re:Sweet. (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, you know what? A better comparison would be Win95 to WinXP. Everything is vaguely the same, but Win95 just doesn't feel as FINISHED as XP.
Re:Sweet. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sweet. (Score:4, Informative)
Ink tech. and patents (was Re:Sweet.) (Score:5, Informative)
Pantone is primarily a spot colour standard (they provide a swatch book which shows what a given colour will look like on coated or uncoated stock), w/ a library of swatches for use on a display to approximate that. They also have a CMYK - equivalency list which shows which Pantone colours can be approximated by CMYK. And they've since branched out to offering a list of RGB swatches which allow one to pick an RGB colour which (in theory, on a colour callibrated monitor) will match a range of official Pantone libraries. These libraries are protected by trademark and copyright, and the methods used to get at the derivatives by patent.
That said, the big problem is that there's no way to do an ink representation in GIMP --- a generalized method of doing this would get one CMYK ``for free'', and allow one to do spot colour monotones, duotones, tritones &c. Possibly even Hexachrome (printing w/ six colours for an extend colour range). There's a British company (Cerilica) w/ a wonderfully cool system for this, Truism --- I _really_ wish Macromedia had listened when I suggested they license that tech.
I've a list of books in my bibliography on my web page which cover this sort of thing (ob. discl. I'm an Amazon Associate). Check out _Four Colors / One Image_ and _Duotones, Tritones and Quadtones_ for specifics.
William
Re:Sweet. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sweet. (Score:5, Interesting)
plus I hate programs that force useless things on me. is there a way to make the "My eBooks" directory fuck off?
Re:Sweet. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sweet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sweet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, Acrobat Reader 6 = lame (Score:5, Informative)
RealNetworks revisited? (Score:4, Insightful)
2) Add bloat and adverts.
3) Loss!
faster acrobat loading (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sweet. (Score:5, Insightful)
OTOH, you're still right that reades sucks on Linux - you can only fill the forms with ascii characters, which is not so funny when your alphabet uses 3 extra characters in addition to English ones...
Thank god ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thank god ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Friends don't let friends use flash.
Re:Flash is worse than spam (Score:3, Insightful)
Why to people actually like flash? Hard for me to fathom.
Re:Flash is worse than spam (Score:5, Insightful)
Flash isn't the problem, it's how it's used. The difference? Kill Flash and people who set out to be annoying will use other methods, like huge animated
Flash is actually pretty slick. Fortunately it's being used more tastefully these days, though there are some who still need to learn that lesson.
I guess what I'm saying is it'd be far more productive to teach people about using it tastefully than it is to bitch about the existence of it.
Re:Flash is worse than spam (Score:4, Insightful)
Flash is a problem in my mind because it is not configurable for the client. It gives complete control to the creators, which sounds all wonderful, but the creators do not have my interest in mind. I have to either block it or watch it. Can I set a Flash window not to loop by default? Can I turn off sound for all instances of the player? Can I limit the amount of data the player can download?
Re:Thank god ... (Score:5, Interesting)
For each 1 site which does use flash for something which absolutely needs an animated illustration of how something works, there'll be no less than 99 sites which:
1. Just make the whole goddamn site in flash, including the plain text parts. So now I have to wait 15 seconds on DSL (!!) for every single page to load. And I pity the poor buggers who are on dial-up.
Bonus points for forcing me to use it all in a tiny flash window, instead of letting me use the whole 1600x1200. More bonus points for forcing me to read whatever flyspeck font looked good on some retard's 640x480 screen. God forbid that they give me plain HTML which I can zoom to a readable size in Opera.
2. Clutter an otherwise potentially useful site with a bazillion slow-loading pointless flash animations. E.g., God forbid that they actually give me a link or button to click on, when they can make it a huge flash animation instead.
3. Make me watch some retarded and huge flash ad before even seeing what the site has to offer. And then give me half a dozen huge slow-loading flash ads per page.
4. Never even tested their flash crap on anything other than Windows 98 (or presumably now Linux). There's a difference in how the thread scheduling works in '98, NT, 2000 and XP. A tight loop which never yields control will _not_ slow the whole computer to a crawl on Win98. It _will_ on NT and 2000. So a single badly written flash ad (or java applet) can make my computer not even accept more than one keystroke per second. Oh, the fun.
And who's to blame?
A. The clueless graphics artist promoted to designer, without any extra training. Instead of making a usable site, he'll keep his old fetish that flashy graphics, colours and non-standard hard-to-read layouts are what art is all about.
B. The SFV (Stupid Fashion Victim.) This can be an artist, a PHB or even a programmer. The common ground is that they think newer _must_ be better, no matter how idiotically mis-used.
Don't get me wrong, new generally is better, but only when used right. Using plastic bottles instead of bricks, just because plastic is a newer technology, won't make a better building.
C. The dot-bomb style PHB or marketroid. The kind who thinks that what matters isn't the content, usefulness or even having a product to sell. The kind who thinks that people will surely rush to buy any useless crap, or even stuff available for free everywhere else, if it's on a site with a megabyte of animations per page and flashy colours everywhere. Yeah, verily, we just need more blink tags and flash animations, and everyone will just rush to give us tons of money for nothing.
Just for the record, I don't have anything against the professions of graphics artist, manager, or marketing expert. There are some skilled people in those professions. And I can respect someone's knowledge in any domain.
My beef is with the ones who are obviously unfit for their job. Some may have been skilled in a completely unrelated domain, but they don't even start to realize how different the new domain is, or how their new job is really a completely different one, with completely different rules, and which requires different skills. E.g., that making a usable GUI is _not_ the same thing as painting a work of art.
Screw that! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Screw that! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Screw that! (Score:3, Insightful)
I can follow powerpoints in class almost perfectly, there's the odd Bullet List Screw-Up, but it's a project that has matured wonderfully.
I no longer have ANY reason to run Windows, and I do alot of things, like:
- DV Capturing via FireWire
- Video Editing with LVE
- Instant Messaging
- Writing Documents, Spreadsheets, etc
- Wireless Networking
- VNC to some of my Customers' D
Re:Screw that! (Score:5, Funny)
And if you don't like vi, I hear that there's a text editor in emacs.
I've never been able to find it, but I hear it's there.
Re:Screw that! (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry, it becomes quite natural after a while.
E-M-A-C-S (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry, it becomes quite natural after a while.
I find it much more intuitive to remap it to Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift
Cheers,
IT
Re:Screw that! (Score:5, Funny)
M-x shell RET vi
Re:Screw that! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a port of MS Office to Linux is likely one of the later ports that will happen, but applications like Flash and other general productivity ones will keep up the interest of all other software houses. There are dozens of big name applications I'd like to see released for Linux. They don't necessarily have to be open source themselves either. Imagine if Linux had a 50% market share just because Macromedia, Adobe, Microsoft and others released big name apps? that would be twenty times the user base we have now, twenty times the coders and twenty times the gamers and twenty times the bug reports.
How much better could Linux get if it were that popular? Unstoppably so
The uncrackable mac [67.160.223.119]
Re:Screw that! (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems like you don't realise that the only real edge Linux has over Windows is the fact that it's not popular, Joe Average OS.
When Linux get as popular as Windows, you'll also get all the bugs, all the bloatware, all the spyware, all the idiots, all the exploits and all the garbage you get with Windows. Getting Flash ported is an obvious step in that direction...
Be careful what you wish for, you probably won't like it when you get it.
Re:Screw that! (Score:3, Interesting)
So, it finally paid (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So, it finally paid (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So, it finally paid (Score:5, Funny)
Flash plug-in? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Flash plug-in? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is one of the easiest things to benchmark.
MX2004 is supposed to be a big improvement, but I'm skint, so I don't know.
Disaster waiting with WINE (Score:5, Insightful)
The roadmap to desktop acceptance for Linux cannot go through WINE.
Re:Disaster waiting with WINE (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Disaster waiting with WINE (Score:5, Informative)
WINE does not, as a general rule, work well with games, since it does not impliment DirectX, so your experience with games cannot be directly translated to non DirectX applications.
In the case of said games it was you trying to get them to run. In this case it is the orginal code author trying to get it to run. That difference may prove significant.
That said, a proper native port would be preferable.
KFG
Re:Disaster waiting with WINE (Score:5, Informative)
I use the Crossover version of WINE every day and I don't have any complaints. It does what I need it to do. And considering it just as a porting library to speed up porting efforts to Linux is an entirely reasonable thing to do.
Long term WINE is going to be an important part of moving people off of Windows.
Not a lot of work (Score:3, Informative)
Dunno if much changed in MX, but i guess it's not a lot of work for Macromedia.
Re:Not a lot of work (Score:3, Informative)
Linux voids finally being filled... (Score:5, Interesting)
AFAIK, there is no alternative to Flash MX on Linux -- yes, Openoffice.org Impress will save to Flash, but to some designers, that's simply not powerful enough.
And Dreamweaver MX is the -only- wysiwyg editor that I will allow to touch my code. It works cleanly and with compatibility, something no other wysiwyg editor, even oss ones, can claim. (disclaimer: I code in gedit
On a side note -- didn't I read something a few months back about Adobe doing something similar with Photoshop?
Disney (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linux voids finally being filled... (Score:5, Interesting)
I would prefer to have a native port, as my experiences with WINE have been less than stellar, but I will take whatever I can get.
On a related note, I used Frontpage to make a site lately, mainly because I needed something simple, cheap and fast and it just happened to be on the system with MS Office. What happened to it? It used to be just a horrid WYSIWYG editor, but it has gone down hill! 2003 couldn't even upload the site and when I did finally get it up, it was broken, because it couldn't transfer its own _derived directory which for some strange reason contained most of the images. Admittedly I had low expectations, but it managed to underwhelm even those.
Long live dreamweaver! Gimp is great for graphics, and while I miss Photoshop since it is what I learned, i am happy with the replacement. Give me dreamweaver and I will be happy.
David, Frustrated Web Artist Extraordinaire.
Re:Linux voids finally being filled... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Linux voids finally being filled... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Linux voids finally being filled... (Score:4, Informative)
Many of it's features were integrated from Homesite, which I was using to program Cold Fusion web pages back in 1996. They took the 'coder's editor'(Homesite) and integrated it with he 'designers editor'(Dreamweaver) and created one Really Powerfull web desing app.
My only problem with it is that the latest version 2004MX is kinda slow on my computer. My computer is an Athlon 1900+/512MG. Most programs are pretty snappy on my system. I'm holding off upgrading until I get the final HL2/Doom3 specs :)
Re:Linux voids finally being filled... (Score:3, Informative)
I think that was last summer, and not Adobe, but three major movie studios cooperating to work together to make some Adobe products work under WINE.
Re:Linux voids finally being filled... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, this has become the chicken-and-egg scenario, where vendors won't make software for Linux until there are more people using it, while there will never be people migrating to Linux until there is more software that will run on it.
As much as I hate it, I feel that WINE is a good intermediate step in this situation, because it gives Macromedia a low-commitment opportunity to feel out the Linux market without fully porting the software.
Re:Linux voids finally being filled... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong. We don't "just need" any proprietary software to be ported to Linux. We do need to get behind the projects that are developing OSS alternatives and support them both community-style and financially. We also need to gather support of the business community, focusing on software that will save them money. ex.) "You spend $10,000/year on Macromedia tools? Support our project and you can drop that expense within 2 years."
I personally would gladly donate $100 to a professionally run project implementing SVG solutions so we can ditch Flash once and for all. I would donate more if it would give me a vote in future feature development. If we can buy Blender in a few month's time, we can surely pool enough resources to do this.
Re:Linux voids finally being filled... (Score:4, Interesting)
I just think Flash is a -great- cross-platform way to make games, movies, etc. AND many business will adopt linux if more of those tools are possible.
Re:Linux voids finally being filled... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is also an installed base of some 500 million players. That's why it needs to be ported to Linux.
Re:Linux voids finally being filled... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Linux voids finally being filled... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't like flash much either. Much of what it is used for is crap.
But there are some good uses, like educational diagrams. Here's a perfect example: how a car transmission works [howstuffworks.com]. You can even play with the gearshift and see what happens. Stuff like this is the only reason I have f
Wrong Software To Port? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wrong Software To Port? (Score:5, Insightful)
Native Flash rendering under *nix could be a very very big step forward towards getting mainstream acceptance for *nix as a mainstream desktop platform.
Re:Wrong Software To Port? (Score:3, Interesting)
Huh ?
The typical desktop user wouldn't go to Linux because of not having flash running on it ?
I agree it would be a good step for professional Web developers, using extensively the capabilities of Flash (there is OO for basic works), but for the desktop ?
IMHO, no. What we need for the desktop is GUI interoperability and more device drivers.
Regards
Re:Wrong Software To Port? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps the current "Linux Crowd" may not want flash, but there may be other reasons they want to go to linux, like the same reasons many other companies are. It's an open, extensible and stable platform with no licensing issues like Windows.
If flash, word, excel, dreamweaver and photoshop came to Linux, the "Linux Crowd" would be a whole lot larger, market share would of course be improved, and developers worldwide would have a much nicer platform to code on than the existing majority player.
Mac OSX tips, desktops and scripts [67.160.223.119]
Re:Wrong Software To Port? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's precisely why you do it. This software is popular. You want as much popular software on linux as you can get, so when jimbob gets pissed off at windows someday and someone suggests he try linux, the inevitable argument of "well can it do this and this like windows" holds no merit.
You gotta take the good with the bad.
Re:Wrong Software To Port? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wrong Software To Port? (Score:5, Insightful)
---
Look, you can use any tool improperly. That doesn't mean the fault is with the TOOL. As with frames in HTML, so with Flash. A bad designer is going to do things badly, no matter the tool or technology.
Re:Wrong Software To Port? (Score:3, Insightful)
I would rather Linux had nothing to do with Flash. Why they didn't go for Dreamweaver I can't imagine.
Because Flash is now all about applications (Score:5, Interesting)
Sad to say, lately their efforts haven't been going so well. Most of the people who are Flash programmers right now don't need new interfaces for creating Flash content because they're already acclimated to the old interface, and many programmers who aren't already in the Flash community aren't getting turned on by these changes to the tools because they already have strong opinions that they aren't open to changing. ("Flash is good for Strongbad, but why should I care?")
So, how do they attract more developers? By going where the developers want to go, to Linux. It might seem obvious here on Slashdot, but this is real leadership in the market in which they operate - let's hope it starts a cascade that turns into a flood.
now the war begins (Score:3, Funny)
Response to SVG? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hopefully Adobe will take notice... (Score:3, Interesting)
Selective porting (Score:3, Interesting)
Can we keep the tools, but not get the plugin? Please? PLEASE?
Isn't it sad when you prefer the platform where a quarter of the "web" content DOESN'T work, and that's perfectly OK? No full motion ads, no ads that start talking to you when you mouse-over them...
Maybe Microsoft should port their apps? (Score:4, Insightful)
Fingers Crossed (Score:5, Funny)
WebDAV support in Macromedia apps (Score:3, Interesting)
A leg up on Adobe (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, if Macromedia really wanted to scoop Adobe, this is the one way to do it.
Vendors are viewing Linux as a viable platform (Score:3, Interesting)
Until now, most multimedia production platforms have either been Windows or Mac based. But as the tools of Linux become better, especially with the recent improvements in KDE, Linux is seen and being used more and more as a desktop production platform. Because of this, software vendors are feeling their ears perk up in the direction of Linux.
While it may never take the lead in the Desktop wars, Linux will find a nice niche somewhere between Windows and Mac. Software vendors who do not take Linux seriously may find themselves and their competitive positions usurped by some other up and comer, if not someone else who wants to write a free version of the software.
Why use Wine first? Do a full port already! (Score:3, Interesting)
First-mover advantage (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm an optimist, so I am sure that Adobe will eventually be convinced by the increased marketshare of Linux to port their applications over as well. But the sooner Macromedia gets a foothold in Linux in the meantime, the more of an advantage it will have when the time comes for Adobe to follow suit.
Since we're talking about Macromedia and Flash anyway: does anyone here know why the open-source Flash plugin hasn't been developed further by anyone? Macromedia's binary-only plugin lacks performance (and often stability) as well as platform-support, is currently still at version 6. Besides, the Flash 7 specs are publicly available anyway, so we wouldn't even have to reverse engineer the format to reimplement the plugin, right?
Perhaps such an open-source plugin could eventually even be integrated in the Mozilla directly? Or would that somehow be an undesirable idea?
See, the problem is that (Score:4, Funny)
1. Release the source under GPL
2. Give the product away for free
3. Hate Microsoft
Neither of which they do. So I predict this will be a complete failure.
Re:See, the problem is that (Score:5, Insightful)
How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
Puhleeeasse NO! (Score:5, Interesting)
BTW for those who want to turn it off by default, all you need to do is rename the plugin, eg
mv
And if you REALLY need it, like those horrific sites that don't actually use HTML (car manufacturer sites are the worst offenders I come across) you can rename it back
Dreamweaver, and No WINE PLEASE! (Score:5, Interesting)
WINE is a pain when it comes to drive letters.
First, it has a totally different view of the filesystem than every native app. It has a fake drive letter (Z: for instance) that leads to
Or, if you set up the home directory as H: or whatever, the user ends up looking for their H: drive from a native app.
WINE is unstable, even using the Crossover Office I bought to try to get my wife, the last holdout in my house, off of Windows.
PLEASE, Macromedia, don't use WINE to hack this together and please port the main application FIRST!!
Re:Dreamweaver, and No WINE PLEASE! (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I'm rooting for a Fireworks MX via Wine to hit the market, cuz Macromedia could corner the for-pay Linux market there before Adobe ever thinks of porting Photoshop.
Flash For Linux alread OSS (Score:5, Informative)
Spalah: Flash animator for Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
It can also generate SVG animation.
What's in it for Macromedia? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, getting the MX tools working with Wine is a great step, and gives them instant cross-platormability, but I have a hunch things will stay at that level for a while..
Macromedia. (Score:3, Interesting)
By the way. Where is Flash Player 7? Your last Linux release, 6.0 r79, is 12 months old now, and several sites now *require* Flash 7.
If they don't take Linux more seriously, they'll eventually see some SVG browser plugins pop up with similar (better) features, and better native Linux support.
Re:Macromedia. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, and I'm STILL hoping they eventually get around to fixing the sound synchronization problems on their Linux player...
Wonder if they've got a "beta" player hidden somewhere, as they had for a while with version 6?...
Sweet (Score:3, Funny)
One more void (Score:5, Funny)
I want my CPU back (Score:5, Insightful)
If it makes a difference, my browser is Mozilla. If you want an example of CPU usage and Flash visit http://movies.yahoo.com/oscars/
Why they are so late: (Score:5, Insightful)
And here is why they're to late for me to collect my dinner out:
During the dot-bomb Flash was everybodys darling. There was no way you could design a solid site with predictable Layout behaviour without using flash. CSS was so crappy everyone just plain ignored it after playing with it for 2 hours. If you wanted a webdoc that was more than just a string of characters you had to use flash.
Then came the bomb, the web grew up within 6 months flat, Flash was to crappy for solid client side apps and the remaining pros switched to functional sites, also ditching Dreamweavers template engine for the bazillion OSS CMSes popping up left right and center. In the mean time IE and Netscape 6.1/Mozilla finally fullfilled the promise CSS had been making for 5 years. That all together weighed in on MM. Flash lost big chunks of it's significance on a monthly basis.
Nowadays Sites are cool and don't need no flash whatsoever.
But here's a really interessting thing: I happend to work on a Rich Media Framework in Flash MX 2004 Pro. After 2.5 years ignoring it I was in pretty fast again. (Sidenote: Customer and Partners agreed to GPL it once the bills are payed!) I actually had to install Windows to do it. While the IDE still has the typical super-crappy anoying macromedia glitches and quirks in it, ActionScript 2 has become a full range PL. ECMA compliance, error handling, a stack of oreilly books for it and all. Rolling an XML controlled industry leading E-Learn-Player and Webpresentation framework was a piece of cake and took me and a guy I work with no more than 8 weeks. On top of that, Macromedia is getting a drift before anybody else in the app vendor field: Their newest product 'breeze', doesn't come in a box anymore. They sell it as a service!
I presume that they saw income going down after the bomb and hushed and listend to the experts. I think there is a strong developers team with them that is seriously fed up with the crappy underlyings in their products (just like many of the professional customers) and that they have gotten a chance to call the shots. Not only is MM doing some very smart moves as a corp. right now, but a Flash MX 2k5 Pro for Linux would bring me right back onto their list. MM has had a steady revenue stream through nice packaging. Now that that doesn't work anymore, they're doing the next step. If I were to bet a fistfull of stockshares on a closed source software vendor, they'd be my first choice.
Linux/OSS is rolling and there ain't no stopping it. And now that MM isn't everybody darling anymore they have to shape up and comply.
All good news indeed.
I wouldn't bank too much on this. (Score:4, Interesting)
Meanwhile, we returned our copy of ColdFusion MX Server, which wasn't that hard since the support staff was used to taking those calls. We stuck with the older CF server and are almost done porting to PHP. Further, eventually, I discovered Quanta and so no longer care about using HomeSite/CF Studio under WINE.
Obviously, our new setup doesn't take well to Flash, but that's for designers more than developers like us, so I don't feel a loss. We've found the free software world's equivalent and we've found it's better, cheaper, and far more reliable.
From the sound of it, they're going to do like Corel did and make WINE-compatible programs, but as I recall Corel actually had to package an entire WINE distribution with their software to make it work reliably - not exactly efficient. We'll see, but it's going to be awhile before I trust Macromedia to do anything good with Linux for a bit.
-N
Re:eaiser to run? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sold (Score:3, Informative)
No Doubt--having Dreamweaver tie into Apache/Postgre/MySql would send me running to CompUSSR to pick up a copy. Flash? I couldn't care less--.swf is one of the more evil file extensions out there.
Fireworks would be nice too--it's great for doing quick mockups of navbars, etc. Fireworks doesn't write the cleanest code ever, but when you can do a prototype navbar in about 10 minutes, who cares? Not I, at least.
OTOH, I doubt that the developers of NVU [nvu.com] are terribly pleased. There will be those out there
Re:Flash sucks (Score:5, Informative)
I think you may have some other problems, if you can't play a Flash movie without crushing your performance. As I type this, I have an 800x600 Flash movie playing, 5 other instances (and probably 15 tabs) of Firefox running, as well as an active connection to a busy MUD, AIM, etc....With no appreciable slowdown at all. And this is on a 4 year-old P3 667.
As others have said above me, the problem is not with Flash itself, but with how people use it. Yes, it can be used to make annoying ads and interfaces, but it can also be used to make some pretty damn neat things as well.
Re:How About (Score:5, Informative)
It turns all Flash animations into a little button - which loads and shows the flash animation only when you click on it.